Where the NHL Stashes Its Mistakes

Faced With a Glut of Bloated Contracts,Teams Ship More Millionaires to the Bus Leagues

By

Kevin Clark

Updated Feb. 25, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Last spring, goaltender Michael Leighton led the Philadelphia Flyers to the Stanley Cup Finals. One month later, he cashed in with a two-year, $3.1 million contract.

On a recent night in January, however, Leighton was minding the net for the Adirondack Phantoms of the American Hockey League at the Glens Falls Civic Center in upstate New York. The crowd of 3,889 was a little bigger than normal, but not on his account. It was Girl Scout night. "It's tough just to think about it," Leighton says.

ENLARGE

Former New York Rangers defenseman Wade Redden, a two-time NHL All-Star.
Jesse Burke for the Wall Street Journal

There's nothing unusual about a millionaire baseball player doing a stint in the minors to retool his game or come back from an injury. But hockey's minor leagues are a different animal: They exist mostly as a holding pen for journeymen and fringe prospects. Future stars like Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin never set foot in them and the facilities and accommodations tend to be considerably more spartan.

This season, thanks to a little-known loophole in the league's labor deal and a growing pileup of phenomenally bad contracts, the AHL has seen something new: an influx of millionaires making as much as double the NHL's average salary.

Sheldon Souray, a former Edmonton Oilers defenseman who was once married to a Baywatch model, is patrolling the blue line for the Hershey Bears for $5.5 million. He was loaned to Hershey in the pre-season when Edmonton asked him not to report for training camp and no team picked him up off waivers.

Former New York Rangers defenseman Wade Redden, a two-time All-Star, is taking eight hour bus rides as a member of the Connecticut Whale. At a salary of $6.5 million, he earns the AHL's minimum salary of $37,500 in just over one period of play.

Defenseman Mike Commodore, who won a Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006, was sent down to the Springfield Falcons in January after the Blue Jackets failed to find a team willing to trade for him. Despite making $3.75 million, he's living in a hotel in downtown Springfield and doesn't have a car. "Honestly, I don't know where I'd go," he says.

The root of the problem is the NHL's salary cap, which was introduced in hockey for the first time in 2005 and limits the amount teams can spend on players to $59 million. Many of the league's general managers had very little idea how dangerous a cap system can be, and as such, signed a lot of players to long, bloated contracts that are now coming back to haunt them. But during the 2005 negotiations, the players union asked for an unusual provision that allows teams to limit their cap count to the salaries of players who are actually in the locker room. If a team can find a place to stash a player they no longer want, his salary doesn't count.

Some teams have taken novel approaches. The Chicago Blackhawks shed goaltender Cristobal Huet's $5.6 million salary by loaning him to a team in Switzerland. But the majority of the league's overpaid and unwanted have been sent to discover the charms of life in the AHL.

As you might expect, the disparities in income on these teams now creates some unusual situations. In minor league hockey, there's a tradition known as "The Board," where players place small sums of money for the scorer of the game's game-winning goal to collect. Most nights, the board can be $100 or so. No longer. Redden has placed iPads on the board and Commodore has put up as much as $1,000.

When Commodore got to Springfield, he thought the team could use a particular type of weightlifting machine so he bought $2,000 worth of equipment on his own dime. He says he's grown so accustomed to paying for things that it's getting a bit "awkward" with his teammates. "The other guys want to start contributing," he said.

The NHL's waiver system makes it unlikely any of these players will be back in the big league anytime soon. If a player is picked up on waivers, both his new team and his old team must add half the player's salary to their salary cap total. For players like Redden, who signed a six-year guaranteed contract in 2008, that's a huge disincentive that has turned the AHL into hockey's version of a white-collar prison.

ENLARGE

Redden suits up for the Connecticut Whale of the American Hockey League on Feb. 13.
Jesse Burke for the Wall Street Journal

It's not clear if the stashing issue will come up again when the league's current collective bargaining agreement expires in Sept. 2012. Scott Howson, the Blue Jackets general manager who sent Commodore down, said eating his salary in the minors is not "a desirable solution."

The NHL doesn't consider stashing players in the minors a violation of the rules. NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said the move isn't common enough to be a problem yet, but that the number of "high-profile players" with big contracts who've been sent down for cap management is a situation that "bears watching."

As for Commodore, he says he's made peace with his situation. "At the time I signed the contract, I heard 'overpaid, overpaid, overpaid!' and that's fine, whatever, maybe I am."

For a year, he said, the contract worked out splendidly. But after injuries and a coaching change, his career in Columbus started to unravel. In the end, he says, "it just so happened to be my head on the block."

Rick Wright, a 31-year-old Phantoms fan who works for a satellite company said he didn't think fans particularly paid attention or noticed that Leighton, the goalie from last year's Stanley Cup Finals, is playing for their hometown team. "On one hand, I feel sorry for him because he's stuck in the AHL, but on the other hand, it's good because we had a lot of goaltending problems at the end of last year," he said.

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